Episode 115 - Exploring Kindle Vella with Jason Hamilton
January 18, 2022
Fantasy author and Content Manager for Kindlepreneur Jason Hamilton discusses Kindle Vella, Amazon’s new platform for serialized fiction. We discuss the opportunity Vella provides for authors to earn money, to interact with readers, and to gain input and insights from their readership, with the caveat that material on Vella needs to be as carefully polished as on any other platform. We discuss the importance of experimentation, and of recognizing that the Vella platform, its readership, and its terms and conditions will change as Amazon expands and tweaks it based on customer feedback. And we speculate about where Amazon might take Vella from here.
Jason Hamilton is a fantasy author and Content Manager for Kindlepreneur. He has a particular love of mythology, history, and geek culture. When he's not writing, his favorite hobbies include hiking, Netflix, chilling with his wife, spouting nonsense words at his baby daughter, and developing his website MythBank.com.
"I think a lot of what authors are going to have to do is experiment over the next few years with this, and see what really resonates with readers and what doesn't. Because this is still brand new, we really don't know what's going to work well and what isn't, and for me, that's kind of exciting." —Jason Hamilton
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Jason Hamilton. Hey Jason, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Jason: I'm doing well. How are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you. Just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Jason Hamilton is a fantasy author and content manager for Kindlepreneur. He has a particular love of mythology, history, and geek culture. When he's not writing, his favorite hobbies include hiking, Netflix, chilling with his wife, spouting nonsense words at his baby daughter, and developing his website mythbank.com.
[00:00:31] And I met Jason when I read an article that he had written on the Kindlepreneur site about Kindle Vella. And that is something that I don't know too much about, and so I also like to seize the opportunity to find someone who's done a little research and tap into the knowledge they have.
[00:00:47] But before we got to that, I have to say, Jason, the concept of being the content manager of Kindlepreneur is pretty intriguing. Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:00:57] Jason: So, I actually recently became the content manager for Kindlepreneur in June. And that's actually kind of a fun story. Dave Chesson, in case anyone doesn't know who he is, is the founder of Kindlepreneur and software like Publisher Rocket and Atticus. He sent out a job description earlier this year. And I saw it and I saw that I qualified for it, and then I went to go sign up for it and he'd taken it down. So I reached out to him, and it was just like, what happened here? And he said, well, we're going to rework it and yada, yada. And so I waited and waited and then I was just like, I can't wait any longer, I really want to apply to this job. So I just applied, and I wrote an article in the style of his site to show that I was serious, and he liked it and ended up hiring me without opening it up again to other people. So it was a really cool experience.
[00:01:54] Matty: That is a cool experience. I've had many guests who have emphasized the concept of, if you're looking to do something, ask, and that's a great example.
[00:02:03] Jason: Yes, I can definitely say that has worked well for me in the past.
[00:02:09] Matty: And I will also just mention that Dave Chesson was a guest on the podcast for Episode 85, OPTIMIZING YOUR KEYWORDS, with tools like Publisher Rocket, he's definitely an expert at. And then I followed that up with an inbetweenisode, Episode 86, MATTY OVERHAULS FOR KEYWORDS. So I'm probably due to give an update to people about how that's going with my overhauled keywords.
[00:02:31] But we want to talk today about Kindle Vella. And so I think some of our listeners may not be familiar with it, so can you just give a description of what Kindle Vella is?
[00:02:40] Jason: Yeah, sure. So Kindle Vella is a serialized fiction platform that was put out by Amazon this year, 2021. And when I say serialized platform, that means you can publish your stories in small chunks, and we're talking 500 to 5,000 words or so. And what this does is it creates a different reading style for readers. Readers can come and they can choose to spend, they're called tokens, on your story, which will give you a little bit of money for every episode that they read. And it's just a different way to interact with readers. And it changes the story structure a little bit, or it can, and there are a few other things to keep in mind when you're publishing a Kindle Vella story. But when it comes down to it, serialized storytelling has been around for forever, practically.
[00:03:39] Since the Victorian age, we had people like Charles Dickens and everybody publishing their huge novels in little segments. And then later, we had the pulp fiction revolution with all these pulp magazines coming out, those were all serialized fiction. And that sort of format has survived into the present day, and I think right now in the digital age, we are very primed for serialized storytelling because everybody just wants little quick and dirty tips and tricks, and they want to get their content fast, right? And we live in an age where YouTube is such a big thing. This is basically kind of a YouTube for stories. So that's what I think is really exciting about it.
[00:04:27] Matty: Do you have a sense of what demographic the serialization appeals to most?
[00:04:33] Jason: I imagine that it would be younger people predominantly. I know that in the past other countries like China, I know a lot of Eastern countries like China and Korea have done really well. There's some specific apps in those markets that have done really well and taken off, and so this is Amazon's attempt to try and capture that market here in the US and then the Western market, in general. And I imagine it would be younger people, but I don't know that for sure.
[00:05:03] Matty: Yeah well, it does seem, at least at the time that you wrote the article I believe, that Vella was maybe not just mobile first, but mobile only platform. Is that still the case?
[00:05:14] Jason: It is definitely a mobile first platform for sure. You can read it online if you have a web browser or something like that. I was just looking at one of them this morning, that seemed really interesting to me. When I wrote the article, you couldn't have it on your e-reader, so if you had a Kindle device or something like that, you couldn't do it there. That may have changed. I find it difficult to believe that Amazon would not open that up eventually. But Amazon, as with many of their big initiatives, they sort of start out small with a minimal viable product, and then slowly start expanding from there.
[00:05:55] Another thing that we've seen is, it didn't initially launch in any foreign markets from the US, so that's another thing that I'm sure we'll see expand in the future.
[00:06:07] Matty: Yeah. Again, having read the article, I saw that Kindle Vella is positioned as competitor to platforms like Radish, Wattpad. I had been at least familiar with the names of those. Webnovel, I hadn't heard about that one before. But one thing that I thought was really interesting was that in their communications to authors, they seem to plug the opportunity to interact with readers. Is that different? Is it more extensive on Vella than it would be, for example, just readers posting reviews on Amazon, let's say, for books they've read?
[00:06:42] Jason: Yeah. So this was actually one of the things that got me more excited about Vella initially is that readers have the chance to comment on individual chapters of your book and to give thumbs up. So it's a form of social proof that we really haven't had, at least not in this way, with books before. I mean, you've had reviews on a book and things like that, which can help a little bit. But this is a great way to see, oh, not as many people liked this chapter, maybe I should look at the comments and see if I could figure out why. Or, people loved this chapter, why did they love it? What are they saying about it? And there's a lot more interactivity there.
[00:07:23] You also have the chance to leave author notes at the end of each chapter. So you can just say a little something about what you were thinking while you were writing that piece and maybe a few words to your readers or something like that. And I think that level of interaction, while it's not quite as good as, say, interacting with someone on your newsletter or on social media, it is definitely a step up from where we've been before with just regular published books.
[00:07:56] Matty: So do you have a sense of whether the interaction is more the same or less than on platforms like Wattpad?
[00:08:04] Jason: Right now, and we're recording this in November of 2021, right now, I would say it's less than Wattpad. Amazon is still kind of finding their audience, I think. And that's one of the biggest complaints I've seen about Kindle Vella so far from authors who have invested a lot of their time in it is that it doesn't actually seem like the audience there is that big yet. But Amazon's good at playing the long game. They have an infinite amount of wealth to throw at this, so I have a feeling that eventually that audience will grow and be there. And if it doesn't, Amazon will shut it down, and maybe Radish or Wattpad or one of those other competitors will pick up the slack. But right now, I think Amazon is in the best position to promote it, and so I expect to see that audience grow in the future.
[00:08:58] Matty: Is there an expectation that the stories that are up there will be a serialized story that all the pieces will hang together in a larger work, like you had mentioned Dickens before, as opposed to somebody who might just post standalone short stories?
[00:09:13] Jason: So, since this is kind of a new thing, we really don't know yet exactly what's going to work and what isn't. I personally think there are a number of ways you could take this. You could create a series of short stories, or you could create basically a novel that is serialized into little chunks. I think there is definitely going to be a unique structure to Kindle Vella stories that wouldn't necessarily work as a novel.
[00:09:44] You want to make sure every episode has a beginning, middle and end, and then preferably has some kind of cliffhanger or something to get people to read the next one. And so that changes up a little bit how you would write each chapter, if you're doing it that way, as opposed to writing it just as part of a novel.
[00:10:01] And with short stories, I think there should definitely be something tying them together so that they're not just a series of short stories, but that they're more like, like one of the examples, one of the ideas that I had was, I really want to do some kind of sci-fi adventure that's like STAR TREK, but more long-term, and doing it in Kindle Vella would allow me to kind of zero in on, here's this character, and then here's this character, and just getting a little slice of life of each of these different people and their roles and things, which wouldn't necessarily work that well as a book, because the structure is too episodic. But it would work well as a Kindle Vella, at least I think it would, because it's all tied together in one thing. But it's very short and small slice of life episodes here and there. So I think a lot of what authors are going to have to do is experiment over the next few years with this and see what really resonates with readers and what doesn't. Because this is still brand new, we really don't know what's going to work well and what isn't and for me, that's kind of exciting.
[00:11:18] Matty: Well, it is interesting, using the STAR TREK analogy, you could have it be a series of their adventures as they visit different planets. I'm really only familiar with the original STAR TREK TV series, but it wasn't like an overarching arc through the whole series, it was just a bunch of episodic, as you're saying, moments. And so the characters and the general setting, theme and so on would tie them together sufficiently.
[00:11:43] And it is a great idea for market research. So if you're thinking, I have this cast of characters I'm thinking about, but I don't really know which one is the protagonist. You could probably find out by publishing a number of episodic stories via Vella and then finding out which ones the readers reacted to most positively or most strongly.
[00:12:03] Jason: Yeah, I think market research is actually a great way to use Kindle Vella. And I don't mean that in the sense that you should just say you have three different story ideas, and you published all three of them, but you don't really publish them as a first draft, where you're not really putting in a lot of work into it, you're not polishing it. That I wouldn't do. You need to polish it; you need to make this a finished product.
[00:12:31] But as you're saying, you could decide, oh, who should my main character be? Who resonates more with readers? And you can kind of explore that and figure that out.
[00:12:41] Or maybe you can try different story ideas and one of them, you might find really resonates with readers and one really doesn't. And then you can take that one that resonated with readers and make a whole series on it, and you could keep that on Vella, or you could publish it as a book series, whatever you want to do.
[00:13:00] It is definitely a low-cost way of testing out your ideas, especially because you don't have the same book cover costs that you have when publishing a book. Generally, it's a lot cheaper to get someone to make a quality Kindle Vella thumbnail for you. And from what I've seen, it's a lot cheaper. The one I'm particularly that I know about will do it for you for $90, which is a lot cheaper than a lot of thumbnails for a lot of different genres of book covers. Fiverr is another place to go to get them for cheap, and when you don't have the lettering and you're just focusing on one small image that needs to be designed in a way that it's clear to readers at a very small scale, what it's about and what genre it is, that's pretty simple for a designer to do, so you can definitely get it for cheaper.
[00:13:49] And then, if you've got a serial that goes on for the equivalent of four or five books, you can keep the same cover for all of that, instead of having to design four or five different covers.
[00:14:36] Matty: What are the limitations on what you do with the material after it has been published on Vella? Would you have to wait a certain amount of time before you publish that as a book on, let's say, KDP and the other online platforms?
[00:14:48] Jason: Yes, that's a great question. So this is one of those things that has actually changed since I wrote the article, the original article, and just goes to show you that Amazon is experimenting with this as well. They're seeing what does and doesn't work.
[00:15:02] It used to be that if you wanted to keep your story on Kindle Vella, you could not have it published anywhere as a book. And that has now changed. Now they allow you to publish a collection of your Kindle Vella stories after you've had at least 30 days from the publication of your last story. So if you write 10 stories on Kindle Vella, and you publish the last one, then 30 days after you published that last story, you could then take those 10 and package them together and make a book out of it. And then you don't have to take it off Kindle Vella, if you do that.
[00:15:47] Matty: What is the financial opportunity on Kindle Vella? How are authors getting paid, what's the royalty percentage and so on?
[00:15:54] Jason: Yeah. So as I mentioned before, the audience doesn't appear to be too big yet. From what I've heard, there are a few people that are seeing some success there. It doesn't sound like they're making a lot yet, but that's purely because the audience isn't there. The way it works is that readers will buy certain tokens and they buy them in bundles of 200 or more. And these tokens are priced differently depending on how many you buy. So if you buy more, it will be a little cheaper for you per token. And then, what they do is they spend those tokens on the Kindle Vella stories that are interesting to them.
[00:16:39] And it can get a little complicated because if they bought a massive amount of tokens for a cheaper price, then if they spend those tokens on you, you will get fewer royalties from it because they didn't spend as much. But let's just say, your Vella story costs 50 tokens, and they spent a dollar on those 50 tokens, then you get a certain percentage of that, Amazon takes some as well. I think it's 50-50, it might've changed. But it is one of those things that's fluctuating and changing all the time, so I don't want to say it's definitively this amount of money or not. But you get a small percentage of it, based on what they've spent.
[00:17:21] And also, how many tokens your story costs to the reader is dependent on how long it is. So a 5,000-word episode, which is the longest you could do on Kindle Vella, will cost the reader 50 tokens. And if you have a 1000-word episode, it would be 10 tokens.
[00:17:44] Matty: The different tokens based on makes sense, but having the author get paid based on how much the token originally costs seems weird, because it sounds like Amazon is penalizing the author if their story appeals to people who are rabid serialized short fiction fans. Am I understanding how that plays out?
[00:18:06] Jason: Yeah, I think that's about right. If you have people buying mass quantities of this stuff, then yeah, clearly those are the rabid readers, and you would get paid less for those read-throughs. I will say it's not that much less, it's something like maybe 10% less.
[00:18:24] Matty: As you're saying, Amazon's always tweaking to see what works best, and so I'm going to be curious if we look back in six months or a year or two years, if they're still following that approach.
[00:18:33] Jason: Yeah, something I would be interested in seeing is how is Kindle Unlimited going to come into this? Are they going to start handing out free tokens to people with Kindle Unlimited or anything like that? Because honestly, for me, if I were a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, which I'm not because I read mostly audio books, Kindle Vella would almost feel too expensive to me, because if you're only paying $10 a month, and you can read as many of these books as you want, that are in Kindle Unlimited, $10 on Kindle Vella will not get you that much content. So it'll be interesting to me to see how this all shakes out, because Amazon's going to be doing a lot of experimenting, trying to find that sweet spot of what the market demands versus how much money they can sell it for. And yeah, we'll just have to wait and see.
[00:19:26] Matty: It's interesting to think about the subscription model, which I think is really gaining a foothold all over the place, and this Vella-like scenario where people are buying tokens and then using the tokens to pay, which feels old fashioned to me, but I don't play in that sandbox much, so I don't know, maybe it's all the rage. But it also kind of feels more like a gaming kind of scenario. And so, maybe they're doing it intentionally because they're thinking that, especially because it seems like a lot of the serialized works or science fiction or fantasy, maybe they're seeing that there's an overlap there. Maybe we're giving them too much credit, but maybe people who are coming to Vella with that background of, I have five tokens so I can buy a sword kind of thing, maybe it seems very natural to them.
[00:20:11] Jason: Yeah, maybe. I think there is a market there for it. I think it is still growing in Western society at least. As I mentioned before, China and Korea and I think Japan have all done really well with these sorts of models. But here we haven't seen it as much and so I think Amazon's trying to get ahead of this game a little bit.
[00:20:32] But we have seen things like podcasting really take off over the last number of years, which is a form of serialization. We've seen, as you said, the subscription model is everywhere now. Everyone's doing a subscription model. Also television, I feel like, because of streaming services have really taken off in the last couple of years as a quality source of entertainment. And so I think we're likely to see that continue, and I think Kindle Vella is a good place to look at that.
[00:21:05] But to be honest, I don't know if Kindle Vella will take off, like Amazon wants it to. It might, and that could be really cool. This is after all, a form of storytelling that is pretty old, it's definitely preceded the digital age. It has few barriers of entry, which makes it attractive, and it's a new thing, which makes it attractive. But I think we will have to wait and see, just to see if that audience is really there, because we haven't seen a huge influx of readers to Kindle Vella yet, but that could change.
[00:21:41] Matty: It is interesting that it feels to me like a very isolated sort of platform. You had mentioned before that you get most of your content through audio. I certainly do a lot of that myself, and I can imagine it would be super cool, like you had mentioned podcasting, it would be super cool to have a serialized story where each episode was going out in ebook format via Vella, and then also in an audio format.
[00:22:06] But it sounds like under the current rules, you wouldn't be able to do that, I'm guessing until after the last episode had wrapped up, assuming that Amazon is applying the same limitations to sharing that content in other media, not doing it in ebook. But it does seem like the more they could pull those things together, if you could sign into Kindle Unlimited and you could get your serialized Vella short stories and an audio book production of that, I've got to believe that's on somebody's radar, because the more you can pull those things together, I think the better it is for the readers. Then the better it is for the author who's earning money from it.
[00:22:44] Jason: Oh, for sure. Because Audible, of course Audible is owned by Amazon, and they're really leaning heavily into the whole podcasting scene right now. Because they're picking up some heat from Spotify, which is making some aggressive moves in that area. And so I could definitely see them saying, hey, here's this Kindle Vella story that has been really popular, why don't we produce an Audible Original? And we can produce all of the episodes that have come so far, and then we can just put them out episode by episode, like a podcast and see how that works. And I could totally see that happening.
[00:23:21] Amazon doesn't have a platform for doing that yet. If you wanted to create Audible versions of your Kindle Vella stories, you would have to, you know, produce it like you would any book right now. But I could definitely see that happening in the future.
[00:23:36] Matty: I will direct people to an episode that everybody should re-review periodically, which was 107, which is THE SEVENTH PROCESS OF PUBLISHING: SELECTIVE RIGHTS LICENSING with Orna Ross. And it's a great example that you want to examine what the Amazon Vella, Kindle Vella contract is asking for, because you want to make sure you don't eliminate the possibility of capitalizing on that content in other ways in the future.
[00:24:03] And I think the advantage of working with a platform like Amazon is, so many people are working on it, like even with Kindle Vella fairly new in its life, there are still many people who have exposure to that. And so if you were to go on and author's platform and ping people about whether they've had any limitations, encountered any limitations through the Vella contract, you'd probably be able to find that information out pretty easily.
[00:24:27] Jason: And so far, Kindle Vella has seemed to be pretty open about that. We know a few things like, now you can publish a book if it has been on Kindle Vella for 30 days or more. But there are other things to be aware of, like you can't publish on Kindle Vella if you are publishing something that has already been published as a book somewhere else, anywhere else. If it's been published as a paperback or as a ebook, anywhere in any store, they don't want it in Kindle Vella.
[00:24:58] We also know that if you have published serial on another serialized platform, like Radish for example, if it's behind a paywall, you can have it published there and simultaneously on Kindle Vella. So it's not like Kindle Unlimited, where you have to be exclusive to Amazon. With Kindle Vella, you do not have to be exclusive to Amazon, but you can't have it as a book unless it's been on Kindle Vella for longer than 30 days, and it has to be behind a paywall. So what that means, unfortunately, is that Wattpad is kind of out, because Wattpad is free for everybody, for the most part. But Radish, if you've got your serialized story on Radish, you can absolutely have it there and on Kindle Vella.
[00:25:46] Also if you were to share your story with Patreon, for example, if you have a Patreon and you wanted to share your serialized story there, you could do that as well. So there a couple of things that Amazon's made pretty clear, but absolutely, you should check your contracts, make sure you know what you're getting into before you go and publish.
[00:26:06] Matty: Are there any other tips you've picked up in your research, if authors are considering Vella or any other pitfalls they should watch out for?
[00:26:15] Jason: So my biggest tip for Kindle Vella is also kind of my biggest tip for a lot of other things in publishing and marketing, and that is to experiment a lot. This is a new platform still, and we don't really know everything that's going to work and what isn't. So I'm giving you tips, like every episode should have a cliffhanger and stuff like that. That's not necessarily true. You can try that and then try something else and see which works better. You can try a series of short stories; you can try just putting up a novel as a series of chapters. I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of those things because at this stage, experimentation is probably key.
[00:26:58] As far as pitfalls, the main thing I would say is that make sure it is quality, that you're not just putting up like a first draft of a novel, and then later you'll package together as a more polished novel. Readers are going to see right through that.
[00:27:12] So I would say, make sure you have an editor go through your work, at least have a proofreader go through everything you put on Kindle Vella.
[00:27:19] Make sure you have a quality thumbnail, as you would want a quality book cover. Make sure it appeals to the right genre. That's another thing right there, our Kindle Vella thumbnails, do they have the same artistic rules of what qualifies as the right genre? A lot of this stuff, we don't really know. So that's one pitfall I would avoid.
[00:27:42] I would also just say, don't assume that the same rules are always going to apply to Kindle Vella that do to other forms of publishing. One of the things I recommended in my original article is that you use Publisher Rocket to come up with some of your keywords, because that's something you can have on Kindle Vella, you can have a certain list of keywords. And then people look on those keywords and find other stories that have the same keyword.
[00:28:10] That's not necessarily something I would recommend now, knowing it a little better. Don't tell Dave that, but you should, because Publisher Rocket is a fantastic software, and it's very good at what it does, but those keywords are better used as accurate descriptions of your genre or your protagonist and different things like that. If you're researching keywords for the main Kindle store, those keywords are not necessarily going to be applicable to Kindle Vella. So don't always assume that the same rules apply, is the other word of advice I'd have there.
[00:28:48] If you go and look at some of the successful Kindle Vella stories on the platform right now, and you look at their keywords, because you can see the keywords publicly in this case, which you can't do regularly with a normal book. So I was looking at one that was a epic fantasy, which is a genre I write in and I enjoy reading, and its keywords were "epic fantasy", "heroic fantasy", "multiple POV", "outlaws", "female protagonist" and "sword and sorcery." So most of those are just genre-based keywords. They're not going to be long tail keywords, which is a term that we use in the keyword industry, to describe keywords that have three or four words to them that get really long and specific. And those are great if you're trying to target a search engine.
[00:29:37] But I think in this case, don’t quite work as well, because if your keyword is for example "female protagonist Victorian age", or something like that, that's probably way too specific for Kindle Vella. People might be typing that into the search bar, but just saying, "female protagonist" would be better because then you can click on that and see all the other stories that have female protagonists in Kindle Vella. It's one of those things that it's a little different, we haven't really had something like it before so again, that experimentation.
[00:30:13] Matty: Since it's early in its life, I don't know the number of stories out there, but it's no doubt a fraction of the number of books that are available on retailers. And so, if you type "female protagonist" on Amazon, you're going to get 8 billion hits, whereas maybe if you typed "female protagonist" into Vella, you're going to get a hundred or something like that. And so it's interesting, the level of specificity varies based on the pool of material you're trying to sort through.
[00:30:40] Are there certain genres that are lending themselves more to Vella at this point?
[00:30:46] Jason: So I've taken a look at it, I see a pretty wide mix of genres. I see a lot of paranormal, a lot of romance, a lot of fantasy, things like that. But you can publish in pretty much any genre.
[00:31:01] Matty: Yeah, it would be interesting to see how the genres that lend themselves to a rapid release strategy, either overlap or don't overlap with the genres that lend themselves to a serialization approach.
[00:31:13] I know we're asking more questions because it's so early on, this is just sort of an attempt to let the listeners know that this is an option out there, but I don't think anybody's going to be able to offer definitive proof for a little while about all these things.
[00:31:27] Jason: It will probably differ from genre to genre. For instance, romance, I see a number of romance serials on Kindle Vella, but I wonder how sustainable that is, because in a typical romance novel, once you have the happily ever after, that's it for those characters. Now you sometimes have a series where you go on and you focus on different side-characters from the first novel or friends or relatives of those initial characters. That's a good example of something where I don't really see how that would work, but they have soap operas that go on forever, so you could take some lessons from that, I guess.
[00:32:04] Matty: Or expanding on the STAR TREK analogy that, maybe there's a setting or a mechanism, an excuse to bring people together. It's like The Dating Service series, and each story is about one couple, customers, clients of the dating service, I don't know. Nobody should pay attention to me when it comes to speculating about romance, because I'm just going to remove myself as an expert from that category entirely.
[00:32:30] Jason: Same here, I am not an expert on romance stuff, maybe I shouldn't talk about.
[00:32:34] Matty: Well Jason, I think you've given us tons of great information to think about, and I think this is just kind of a notice to our listeners that this is something they should keep an eye on and recognize that it is all new. And so something we say today in November of 2021 is not necessarily going to be the same in two days, in December 2021. So, thank you so much for sharing the information you got from your research, and please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and what you do online.
[00:33:02] Jason: So you can find a lot of the articles I've written on kindlepreneur.com. As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm the content manager there, so a lot of the content I write is for that site. And then, my personal website is mythbank.com. It's just my own personal hobby. I'm really interested in mythology and how it informs our popular culture. So, that's also where you can find links to my published work and all of that.
[00:33:31] Matty: Sounds great. Thank you so much, Jason.
[00:33:34] Jason: Yeah. Thank you.
[00:00:05] Jason: I'm doing well. How are you?
[00:00:08] Matty: I'm doing great. Thank you. Just to give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Jason Hamilton is a fantasy author and content manager for Kindlepreneur. He has a particular love of mythology, history, and geek culture. When he's not writing, his favorite hobbies include hiking, Netflix, chilling with his wife, spouting nonsense words at his baby daughter, and developing his website mythbank.com.
[00:00:31] And I met Jason when I read an article that he had written on the Kindlepreneur site about Kindle Vella. And that is something that I don't know too much about, and so I also like to seize the opportunity to find someone who's done a little research and tap into the knowledge they have.
[00:00:47] But before we got to that, I have to say, Jason, the concept of being the content manager of Kindlepreneur is pretty intriguing. Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:00:57] Jason: So, I actually recently became the content manager for Kindlepreneur in June. And that's actually kind of a fun story. Dave Chesson, in case anyone doesn't know who he is, is the founder of Kindlepreneur and software like Publisher Rocket and Atticus. He sent out a job description earlier this year. And I saw it and I saw that I qualified for it, and then I went to go sign up for it and he'd taken it down. So I reached out to him, and it was just like, what happened here? And he said, well, we're going to rework it and yada, yada. And so I waited and waited and then I was just like, I can't wait any longer, I really want to apply to this job. So I just applied, and I wrote an article in the style of his site to show that I was serious, and he liked it and ended up hiring me without opening it up again to other people. So it was a really cool experience.
[00:01:54] Matty: That is a cool experience. I've had many guests who have emphasized the concept of, if you're looking to do something, ask, and that's a great example.
[00:02:03] Jason: Yes, I can definitely say that has worked well for me in the past.
[00:02:09] Matty: And I will also just mention that Dave Chesson was a guest on the podcast for Episode 85, OPTIMIZING YOUR KEYWORDS, with tools like Publisher Rocket, he's definitely an expert at. And then I followed that up with an inbetweenisode, Episode 86, MATTY OVERHAULS FOR KEYWORDS. So I'm probably due to give an update to people about how that's going with my overhauled keywords.
[00:02:31] But we want to talk today about Kindle Vella. And so I think some of our listeners may not be familiar with it, so can you just give a description of what Kindle Vella is?
[00:02:40] Jason: Yeah, sure. So Kindle Vella is a serialized fiction platform that was put out by Amazon this year, 2021. And when I say serialized platform, that means you can publish your stories in small chunks, and we're talking 500 to 5,000 words or so. And what this does is it creates a different reading style for readers. Readers can come and they can choose to spend, they're called tokens, on your story, which will give you a little bit of money for every episode that they read. And it's just a different way to interact with readers. And it changes the story structure a little bit, or it can, and there are a few other things to keep in mind when you're publishing a Kindle Vella story. But when it comes down to it, serialized storytelling has been around for forever, practically.
[00:03:39] Since the Victorian age, we had people like Charles Dickens and everybody publishing their huge novels in little segments. And then later, we had the pulp fiction revolution with all these pulp magazines coming out, those were all serialized fiction. And that sort of format has survived into the present day, and I think right now in the digital age, we are very primed for serialized storytelling because everybody just wants little quick and dirty tips and tricks, and they want to get their content fast, right? And we live in an age where YouTube is such a big thing. This is basically kind of a YouTube for stories. So that's what I think is really exciting about it.
[00:04:27] Matty: Do you have a sense of what demographic the serialization appeals to most?
[00:04:33] Jason: I imagine that it would be younger people predominantly. I know that in the past other countries like China, I know a lot of Eastern countries like China and Korea have done really well. There's some specific apps in those markets that have done really well and taken off, and so this is Amazon's attempt to try and capture that market here in the US and then the Western market, in general. And I imagine it would be younger people, but I don't know that for sure.
[00:05:03] Matty: Yeah well, it does seem, at least at the time that you wrote the article I believe, that Vella was maybe not just mobile first, but mobile only platform. Is that still the case?
[00:05:14] Jason: It is definitely a mobile first platform for sure. You can read it online if you have a web browser or something like that. I was just looking at one of them this morning, that seemed really interesting to me. When I wrote the article, you couldn't have it on your e-reader, so if you had a Kindle device or something like that, you couldn't do it there. That may have changed. I find it difficult to believe that Amazon would not open that up eventually. But Amazon, as with many of their big initiatives, they sort of start out small with a minimal viable product, and then slowly start expanding from there.
[00:05:55] Another thing that we've seen is, it didn't initially launch in any foreign markets from the US, so that's another thing that I'm sure we'll see expand in the future.
[00:06:07] Matty: Yeah. Again, having read the article, I saw that Kindle Vella is positioned as competitor to platforms like Radish, Wattpad. I had been at least familiar with the names of those. Webnovel, I hadn't heard about that one before. But one thing that I thought was really interesting was that in their communications to authors, they seem to plug the opportunity to interact with readers. Is that different? Is it more extensive on Vella than it would be, for example, just readers posting reviews on Amazon, let's say, for books they've read?
[00:06:42] Jason: Yeah. So this was actually one of the things that got me more excited about Vella initially is that readers have the chance to comment on individual chapters of your book and to give thumbs up. So it's a form of social proof that we really haven't had, at least not in this way, with books before. I mean, you've had reviews on a book and things like that, which can help a little bit. But this is a great way to see, oh, not as many people liked this chapter, maybe I should look at the comments and see if I could figure out why. Or, people loved this chapter, why did they love it? What are they saying about it? And there's a lot more interactivity there.
[00:07:23] You also have the chance to leave author notes at the end of each chapter. So you can just say a little something about what you were thinking while you were writing that piece and maybe a few words to your readers or something like that. And I think that level of interaction, while it's not quite as good as, say, interacting with someone on your newsletter or on social media, it is definitely a step up from where we've been before with just regular published books.
[00:07:56] Matty: So do you have a sense of whether the interaction is more the same or less than on platforms like Wattpad?
[00:08:04] Jason: Right now, and we're recording this in November of 2021, right now, I would say it's less than Wattpad. Amazon is still kind of finding their audience, I think. And that's one of the biggest complaints I've seen about Kindle Vella so far from authors who have invested a lot of their time in it is that it doesn't actually seem like the audience there is that big yet. But Amazon's good at playing the long game. They have an infinite amount of wealth to throw at this, so I have a feeling that eventually that audience will grow and be there. And if it doesn't, Amazon will shut it down, and maybe Radish or Wattpad or one of those other competitors will pick up the slack. But right now, I think Amazon is in the best position to promote it, and so I expect to see that audience grow in the future.
[00:08:58] Matty: Is there an expectation that the stories that are up there will be a serialized story that all the pieces will hang together in a larger work, like you had mentioned Dickens before, as opposed to somebody who might just post standalone short stories?
[00:09:13] Jason: So, since this is kind of a new thing, we really don't know yet exactly what's going to work and what isn't. I personally think there are a number of ways you could take this. You could create a series of short stories, or you could create basically a novel that is serialized into little chunks. I think there is definitely going to be a unique structure to Kindle Vella stories that wouldn't necessarily work as a novel.
[00:09:44] You want to make sure every episode has a beginning, middle and end, and then preferably has some kind of cliffhanger or something to get people to read the next one. And so that changes up a little bit how you would write each chapter, if you're doing it that way, as opposed to writing it just as part of a novel.
[00:10:01] And with short stories, I think there should definitely be something tying them together so that they're not just a series of short stories, but that they're more like, like one of the examples, one of the ideas that I had was, I really want to do some kind of sci-fi adventure that's like STAR TREK, but more long-term, and doing it in Kindle Vella would allow me to kind of zero in on, here's this character, and then here's this character, and just getting a little slice of life of each of these different people and their roles and things, which wouldn't necessarily work that well as a book, because the structure is too episodic. But it would work well as a Kindle Vella, at least I think it would, because it's all tied together in one thing. But it's very short and small slice of life episodes here and there. So I think a lot of what authors are going to have to do is experiment over the next few years with this and see what really resonates with readers and what doesn't. Because this is still brand new, we really don't know what's going to work well and what isn't and for me, that's kind of exciting.
[00:11:18] Matty: Well, it is interesting, using the STAR TREK analogy, you could have it be a series of their adventures as they visit different planets. I'm really only familiar with the original STAR TREK TV series, but it wasn't like an overarching arc through the whole series, it was just a bunch of episodic, as you're saying, moments. And so the characters and the general setting, theme and so on would tie them together sufficiently.
[00:11:43] And it is a great idea for market research. So if you're thinking, I have this cast of characters I'm thinking about, but I don't really know which one is the protagonist. You could probably find out by publishing a number of episodic stories via Vella and then finding out which ones the readers reacted to most positively or most strongly.
[00:12:03] Jason: Yeah, I think market research is actually a great way to use Kindle Vella. And I don't mean that in the sense that you should just say you have three different story ideas, and you published all three of them, but you don't really publish them as a first draft, where you're not really putting in a lot of work into it, you're not polishing it. That I wouldn't do. You need to polish it; you need to make this a finished product.
[00:12:31] But as you're saying, you could decide, oh, who should my main character be? Who resonates more with readers? And you can kind of explore that and figure that out.
[00:12:41] Or maybe you can try different story ideas and one of them, you might find really resonates with readers and one really doesn't. And then you can take that one that resonated with readers and make a whole series on it, and you could keep that on Vella, or you could publish it as a book series, whatever you want to do.
[00:13:00] It is definitely a low-cost way of testing out your ideas, especially because you don't have the same book cover costs that you have when publishing a book. Generally, it's a lot cheaper to get someone to make a quality Kindle Vella thumbnail for you. And from what I've seen, it's a lot cheaper. The one I'm particularly that I know about will do it for you for $90, which is a lot cheaper than a lot of thumbnails for a lot of different genres of book covers. Fiverr is another place to go to get them for cheap, and when you don't have the lettering and you're just focusing on one small image that needs to be designed in a way that it's clear to readers at a very small scale, what it's about and what genre it is, that's pretty simple for a designer to do, so you can definitely get it for cheaper.
[00:13:49] And then, if you've got a serial that goes on for the equivalent of four or five books, you can keep the same cover for all of that, instead of having to design four or five different covers.
[00:14:36] Matty: What are the limitations on what you do with the material after it has been published on Vella? Would you have to wait a certain amount of time before you publish that as a book on, let's say, KDP and the other online platforms?
[00:14:48] Jason: Yes, that's a great question. So this is one of those things that has actually changed since I wrote the article, the original article, and just goes to show you that Amazon is experimenting with this as well. They're seeing what does and doesn't work.
[00:15:02] It used to be that if you wanted to keep your story on Kindle Vella, you could not have it published anywhere as a book. And that has now changed. Now they allow you to publish a collection of your Kindle Vella stories after you've had at least 30 days from the publication of your last story. So if you write 10 stories on Kindle Vella, and you publish the last one, then 30 days after you published that last story, you could then take those 10 and package them together and make a book out of it. And then you don't have to take it off Kindle Vella, if you do that.
[00:15:47] Matty: What is the financial opportunity on Kindle Vella? How are authors getting paid, what's the royalty percentage and so on?
[00:15:54] Jason: Yeah. So as I mentioned before, the audience doesn't appear to be too big yet. From what I've heard, there are a few people that are seeing some success there. It doesn't sound like they're making a lot yet, but that's purely because the audience isn't there. The way it works is that readers will buy certain tokens and they buy them in bundles of 200 or more. And these tokens are priced differently depending on how many you buy. So if you buy more, it will be a little cheaper for you per token. And then, what they do is they spend those tokens on the Kindle Vella stories that are interesting to them.
[00:16:39] And it can get a little complicated because if they bought a massive amount of tokens for a cheaper price, then if they spend those tokens on you, you will get fewer royalties from it because they didn't spend as much. But let's just say, your Vella story costs 50 tokens, and they spent a dollar on those 50 tokens, then you get a certain percentage of that, Amazon takes some as well. I think it's 50-50, it might've changed. But it is one of those things that's fluctuating and changing all the time, so I don't want to say it's definitively this amount of money or not. But you get a small percentage of it, based on what they've spent.
[00:17:21] And also, how many tokens your story costs to the reader is dependent on how long it is. So a 5,000-word episode, which is the longest you could do on Kindle Vella, will cost the reader 50 tokens. And if you have a 1000-word episode, it would be 10 tokens.
[00:17:44] Matty: The different tokens based on makes sense, but having the author get paid based on how much the token originally costs seems weird, because it sounds like Amazon is penalizing the author if their story appeals to people who are rabid serialized short fiction fans. Am I understanding how that plays out?
[00:18:06] Jason: Yeah, I think that's about right. If you have people buying mass quantities of this stuff, then yeah, clearly those are the rabid readers, and you would get paid less for those read-throughs. I will say it's not that much less, it's something like maybe 10% less.
[00:18:24] Matty: As you're saying, Amazon's always tweaking to see what works best, and so I'm going to be curious if we look back in six months or a year or two years, if they're still following that approach.
[00:18:33] Jason: Yeah, something I would be interested in seeing is how is Kindle Unlimited going to come into this? Are they going to start handing out free tokens to people with Kindle Unlimited or anything like that? Because honestly, for me, if I were a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, which I'm not because I read mostly audio books, Kindle Vella would almost feel too expensive to me, because if you're only paying $10 a month, and you can read as many of these books as you want, that are in Kindle Unlimited, $10 on Kindle Vella will not get you that much content. So it'll be interesting to me to see how this all shakes out, because Amazon's going to be doing a lot of experimenting, trying to find that sweet spot of what the market demands versus how much money they can sell it for. And yeah, we'll just have to wait and see.
[00:19:26] Matty: It's interesting to think about the subscription model, which I think is really gaining a foothold all over the place, and this Vella-like scenario where people are buying tokens and then using the tokens to pay, which feels old fashioned to me, but I don't play in that sandbox much, so I don't know, maybe it's all the rage. But it also kind of feels more like a gaming kind of scenario. And so, maybe they're doing it intentionally because they're thinking that, especially because it seems like a lot of the serialized works or science fiction or fantasy, maybe they're seeing that there's an overlap there. Maybe we're giving them too much credit, but maybe people who are coming to Vella with that background of, I have five tokens so I can buy a sword kind of thing, maybe it seems very natural to them.
[00:20:11] Jason: Yeah, maybe. I think there is a market there for it. I think it is still growing in Western society at least. As I mentioned before, China and Korea and I think Japan have all done really well with these sorts of models. But here we haven't seen it as much and so I think Amazon's trying to get ahead of this game a little bit.
[00:20:32] But we have seen things like podcasting really take off over the last number of years, which is a form of serialization. We've seen, as you said, the subscription model is everywhere now. Everyone's doing a subscription model. Also television, I feel like, because of streaming services have really taken off in the last couple of years as a quality source of entertainment. And so I think we're likely to see that continue, and I think Kindle Vella is a good place to look at that.
[00:21:05] But to be honest, I don't know if Kindle Vella will take off, like Amazon wants it to. It might, and that could be really cool. This is after all, a form of storytelling that is pretty old, it's definitely preceded the digital age. It has few barriers of entry, which makes it attractive, and it's a new thing, which makes it attractive. But I think we will have to wait and see, just to see if that audience is really there, because we haven't seen a huge influx of readers to Kindle Vella yet, but that could change.
[00:21:41] Matty: It is interesting that it feels to me like a very isolated sort of platform. You had mentioned before that you get most of your content through audio. I certainly do a lot of that myself, and I can imagine it would be super cool, like you had mentioned podcasting, it would be super cool to have a serialized story where each episode was going out in ebook format via Vella, and then also in an audio format.
[00:22:06] But it sounds like under the current rules, you wouldn't be able to do that, I'm guessing until after the last episode had wrapped up, assuming that Amazon is applying the same limitations to sharing that content in other media, not doing it in ebook. But it does seem like the more they could pull those things together, if you could sign into Kindle Unlimited and you could get your serialized Vella short stories and an audio book production of that, I've got to believe that's on somebody's radar, because the more you can pull those things together, I think the better it is for the readers. Then the better it is for the author who's earning money from it.
[00:22:44] Jason: Oh, for sure. Because Audible, of course Audible is owned by Amazon, and they're really leaning heavily into the whole podcasting scene right now. Because they're picking up some heat from Spotify, which is making some aggressive moves in that area. And so I could definitely see them saying, hey, here's this Kindle Vella story that has been really popular, why don't we produce an Audible Original? And we can produce all of the episodes that have come so far, and then we can just put them out episode by episode, like a podcast and see how that works. And I could totally see that happening.
[00:23:21] Amazon doesn't have a platform for doing that yet. If you wanted to create Audible versions of your Kindle Vella stories, you would have to, you know, produce it like you would any book right now. But I could definitely see that happening in the future.
[00:23:36] Matty: I will direct people to an episode that everybody should re-review periodically, which was 107, which is THE SEVENTH PROCESS OF PUBLISHING: SELECTIVE RIGHTS LICENSING with Orna Ross. And it's a great example that you want to examine what the Amazon Vella, Kindle Vella contract is asking for, because you want to make sure you don't eliminate the possibility of capitalizing on that content in other ways in the future.
[00:24:03] And I think the advantage of working with a platform like Amazon is, so many people are working on it, like even with Kindle Vella fairly new in its life, there are still many people who have exposure to that. And so if you were to go on and author's platform and ping people about whether they've had any limitations, encountered any limitations through the Vella contract, you'd probably be able to find that information out pretty easily.
[00:24:27] Jason: And so far, Kindle Vella has seemed to be pretty open about that. We know a few things like, now you can publish a book if it has been on Kindle Vella for 30 days or more. But there are other things to be aware of, like you can't publish on Kindle Vella if you are publishing something that has already been published as a book somewhere else, anywhere else. If it's been published as a paperback or as a ebook, anywhere in any store, they don't want it in Kindle Vella.
[00:24:58] We also know that if you have published serial on another serialized platform, like Radish for example, if it's behind a paywall, you can have it published there and simultaneously on Kindle Vella. So it's not like Kindle Unlimited, where you have to be exclusive to Amazon. With Kindle Vella, you do not have to be exclusive to Amazon, but you can't have it as a book unless it's been on Kindle Vella for longer than 30 days, and it has to be behind a paywall. So what that means, unfortunately, is that Wattpad is kind of out, because Wattpad is free for everybody, for the most part. But Radish, if you've got your serialized story on Radish, you can absolutely have it there and on Kindle Vella.
[00:25:46] Also if you were to share your story with Patreon, for example, if you have a Patreon and you wanted to share your serialized story there, you could do that as well. So there a couple of things that Amazon's made pretty clear, but absolutely, you should check your contracts, make sure you know what you're getting into before you go and publish.
[00:26:06] Matty: Are there any other tips you've picked up in your research, if authors are considering Vella or any other pitfalls they should watch out for?
[00:26:15] Jason: So my biggest tip for Kindle Vella is also kind of my biggest tip for a lot of other things in publishing and marketing, and that is to experiment a lot. This is a new platform still, and we don't really know everything that's going to work and what isn't. So I'm giving you tips, like every episode should have a cliffhanger and stuff like that. That's not necessarily true. You can try that and then try something else and see which works better. You can try a series of short stories; you can try just putting up a novel as a series of chapters. I'm not saying you shouldn't do any of those things because at this stage, experimentation is probably key.
[00:26:58] As far as pitfalls, the main thing I would say is that make sure it is quality, that you're not just putting up like a first draft of a novel, and then later you'll package together as a more polished novel. Readers are going to see right through that.
[00:27:12] So I would say, make sure you have an editor go through your work, at least have a proofreader go through everything you put on Kindle Vella.
[00:27:19] Make sure you have a quality thumbnail, as you would want a quality book cover. Make sure it appeals to the right genre. That's another thing right there, our Kindle Vella thumbnails, do they have the same artistic rules of what qualifies as the right genre? A lot of this stuff, we don't really know. So that's one pitfall I would avoid.
[00:27:42] I would also just say, don't assume that the same rules are always going to apply to Kindle Vella that do to other forms of publishing. One of the things I recommended in my original article is that you use Publisher Rocket to come up with some of your keywords, because that's something you can have on Kindle Vella, you can have a certain list of keywords. And then people look on those keywords and find other stories that have the same keyword.
[00:28:10] That's not necessarily something I would recommend now, knowing it a little better. Don't tell Dave that, but you should, because Publisher Rocket is a fantastic software, and it's very good at what it does, but those keywords are better used as accurate descriptions of your genre or your protagonist and different things like that. If you're researching keywords for the main Kindle store, those keywords are not necessarily going to be applicable to Kindle Vella. So don't always assume that the same rules apply, is the other word of advice I'd have there.
[00:28:48] If you go and look at some of the successful Kindle Vella stories on the platform right now, and you look at their keywords, because you can see the keywords publicly in this case, which you can't do regularly with a normal book. So I was looking at one that was a epic fantasy, which is a genre I write in and I enjoy reading, and its keywords were "epic fantasy", "heroic fantasy", "multiple POV", "outlaws", "female protagonist" and "sword and sorcery." So most of those are just genre-based keywords. They're not going to be long tail keywords, which is a term that we use in the keyword industry, to describe keywords that have three or four words to them that get really long and specific. And those are great if you're trying to target a search engine.
[00:29:37] But I think in this case, don’t quite work as well, because if your keyword is for example "female protagonist Victorian age", or something like that, that's probably way too specific for Kindle Vella. People might be typing that into the search bar, but just saying, "female protagonist" would be better because then you can click on that and see all the other stories that have female protagonists in Kindle Vella. It's one of those things that it's a little different, we haven't really had something like it before so again, that experimentation.
[00:30:13] Matty: Since it's early in its life, I don't know the number of stories out there, but it's no doubt a fraction of the number of books that are available on retailers. And so, if you type "female protagonist" on Amazon, you're going to get 8 billion hits, whereas maybe if you typed "female protagonist" into Vella, you're going to get a hundred or something like that. And so it's interesting, the level of specificity varies based on the pool of material you're trying to sort through.
[00:30:40] Are there certain genres that are lending themselves more to Vella at this point?
[00:30:46] Jason: So I've taken a look at it, I see a pretty wide mix of genres. I see a lot of paranormal, a lot of romance, a lot of fantasy, things like that. But you can publish in pretty much any genre.
[00:31:01] Matty: Yeah, it would be interesting to see how the genres that lend themselves to a rapid release strategy, either overlap or don't overlap with the genres that lend themselves to a serialization approach.
[00:31:13] I know we're asking more questions because it's so early on, this is just sort of an attempt to let the listeners know that this is an option out there, but I don't think anybody's going to be able to offer definitive proof for a little while about all these things.
[00:31:27] Jason: It will probably differ from genre to genre. For instance, romance, I see a number of romance serials on Kindle Vella, but I wonder how sustainable that is, because in a typical romance novel, once you have the happily ever after, that's it for those characters. Now you sometimes have a series where you go on and you focus on different side-characters from the first novel or friends or relatives of those initial characters. That's a good example of something where I don't really see how that would work, but they have soap operas that go on forever, so you could take some lessons from that, I guess.
[00:32:04] Matty: Or expanding on the STAR TREK analogy that, maybe there's a setting or a mechanism, an excuse to bring people together. It's like The Dating Service series, and each story is about one couple, customers, clients of the dating service, I don't know. Nobody should pay attention to me when it comes to speculating about romance, because I'm just going to remove myself as an expert from that category entirely.
[00:32:30] Jason: Same here, I am not an expert on romance stuff, maybe I shouldn't talk about.
[00:32:34] Matty: Well Jason, I think you've given us tons of great information to think about, and I think this is just kind of a notice to our listeners that this is something they should keep an eye on and recognize that it is all new. And so something we say today in November of 2021 is not necessarily going to be the same in two days, in December 2021. So, thank you so much for sharing the information you got from your research, and please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and what you do online.
[00:33:02] Jason: So you can find a lot of the articles I've written on kindlepreneur.com. As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm the content manager there, so a lot of the content I write is for that site. And then, my personal website is mythbank.com. It's just my own personal hobby. I'm really interested in mythology and how it informs our popular culture. So, that's also where you can find links to my published work and all of that.
[00:33:31] Matty: Sounds great. Thank you so much, Jason.
[00:33:34] Jason: Yeah. Thank you.
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Episode 107 - The Seventh Process of Publishing: Selective Rights Licensing with Orna Ross
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Episode 107 - The Seventh Process of Publishing: Selective Rights Licensing with Orna Ross
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